First Fleet drawings study may add artist to William Dawes' talents

Tim Barlass

The history of the settlement of NSW is mostly focused on abandonment, survival, floggings, starvation and frontier conflict.

But new research by the Mitchell Library provides evidence of a much richer culture in the colony than previously thought, and may finally solve a mystery - who painted some dozen magnificent botanical pictures held for decades by the library.

Yes or no? Curator Louise Anemaat with a drawing of a purple donkey orchid, one of the pictures caught up in the artist identity mystery. Photo: Peter Rae

The library study is centred on a recently acquired collection of First Fleet art.

A key figure to arise in the study is William Dawes, who built the observatory at Dawes Point, is well regarded as an officer, astronomer, botanist and student of the Aboriginal language.

Now the library's pictures curator, Louise Anemaat, says Dawes was ''possibly'' also an accomplished First Fleet watercolourist responsible for a dozen unsigned paintings that have puzzled library personnel for more than a century.

Six volumes containing 745 pictures of largely unseen art of the First Fleet, amassed by the 13th Earl of Derby in England, were acquired by the library in 2011 for $7.1 million. The study has advanced the detective work of trying to discover just who painted the dozen botanical studies attributed, perhaps wrongly, to George Raper.

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Speaking before the opening of Artist Colony: Drawing Sydney's Nature, a free exhibition at the State Library, Ms Anemaat said the new theory that the paintings were by Dawes was supported by several convincing pieces of evidence.

Suspicions first emerged with discovery of striking similarities in the use of colours in incomplete images among the 745 drawings in the Derby collection and the dozen unsigned pictures of the same plants.

Then there was a letter of recommendation from astronomer William Bayly, who sailed on Cook's second and third voyages, to Sir Joseph Banks, asserting that Dawes ''draws very well''.

One of the pictures has notes with Dawes' signature at the side. The picture, completed in September 1790, shows an orchid found ''in vast quantities on the sheep downs between Pitt Water and the Sea''.

Although Dawes appears to have written the annotation, that alone is not seen as evidence that he painted the picture.

The handwriting matches that in Dawes' diaries and he is known to have made an excursion to the wilds of Pittwater at that time.

Ms Anemaat said if the pictures were by Dawes, it made sense there would not be huge numbers of drawings because it was not his primary interest.

''Because Dawes is not somebody we had thought of as a First Fleet artist, it just gives us a little bit more sense of how people were operating in the colony,'' she said

''It starts to suggest a richer and more culturally diverse and active community than we usually associate with the early years of the First Fleet.''